


Ctrl+Alt+Delete

by Swordfishtrombone84



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Blow Jobs, Drunkenness, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hand Jobs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-06
Updated: 2014-08-06
Packaged: 2018-02-12 01:52:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2091408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swordfishtrombone84/pseuds/Swordfishtrombone84
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They weren’t sure whether to even try kissing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ctrl+Alt+Delete

**Author's Note:**

> I've changed the title on this. A last-minute revision. I'm never happy with my titles.

1.

Neither of them could say precisely when they’d developed from unashamedly co-dependent friends into semi-reluctant lovers.  It happened over a series of months in which cases were scarce, Sherlock was often angry and despondent and John was patient but increasingly concerned.  John would find Sherlock stretched on the couch in the early hours of the morning, wearing very little and watching terrible television with the volume turned down low.  John would fetch a bowl of cereal and sit in his chair – Sherlock would gaze at the television with a mixture of morbid fascination and existential despair, and John would watch Sherlock with precisely the same look.  John was tired and could have slept if he’d wanted to, but he felt that if he took his eyes off Sherlock for a moment, something terrible might happen.

One morning, somewhere in the middle of a hundred identical mornings that accumulated on top of each other like a duplicating window on a malfunctioning computer screen, John put down his cereal bowl half-full, went over to the couch, took Sherlock by the ankles and pulled his legs off the sofa.  Then he sat down, grabbed Sherlock’s hand and without a trace of gentleness laced his fingers through Sherlock’s and pressed their joined hands firmly on top of his own knee.  After a moment, the laced fingers didn’t feel quite right, so he unlaced them and simply held Sherlock’s hand under his own.  When John looked at Sherlock’s face, he saw him studiously and almost-successfully hiding a pleased sort of surprise.  John felt like he’d pressed ‘Ctrl+Alt+Delete’ on their frozen lives – the screen popped with a little static bubble of noise, and went black.  He listened for the low, churning warm sounds of rebooting.

It felt almost-right.  An incomplete solution to the baffling mystery of their strange association.  Those who looked in from the outside thought they had it all solved – the unresolved sexual tension, the final piece of the puzzle, if they would only admit it – so simple.  But it _wasn’t_ so simple.  If it had been, they would have been lovers long ago.   John didn’t lie awake at night dreaming of the marble-white planes of Sherlock’s naked body, but he did look at him in the midst of his deductions and feel the same thrill he remembered from his first school disco, when he’d been dancing badly and Jemima Horsely had danced over and pressed her front up against his, shocking his sleeping penis awake.  Sherlock wouldn’t say he was unrequitedly _in love_ with John, but he needed him, constantly – if not his presence, then the reassurance of it.  The knowledge of John’s existence both comforted and thrilled him.

 

2.

They weren’t sure whether to even try kissing.  They spent days, working together and apart, outside and around the flat, alternately too close and too far apart from each other.  Their thighs pressed together as they sat on the sofa, John warm and stifling beside Sherlock as he buttered his toast while Sherlock rinsed out Tupperware to store fresh human tongues.  When John went out for more milk and Tunnocks teacakes, Sherlock felt lost. 

At length they pressed their mouths together perfunctorily over a game of Ultimate Scrabble.  Sherlock had slammed down the Oxford English Dictionary in disgust upon discovering that the word ‘Byronic’ was capitalised, and in a fit of pique, swept all the tiles and the board off the coffee table with a pass of his arm.  The semi-romantic drama of them made them both pause, and John was warmed by the fact that Sherlock had done it partly to amuse John.  When they looked at each other, they both seemed to realise that this was a good moment to kiss, and they shuffled towards each other on their knees until their faces were very close.  John’s face cracked in a laugh, but Sherlock stayed deadly serious, and then John pecked at Sherlock’s closed mouth and pulled back.  With hardly a beat’s pause, Sherlock pursed his lips like a little girl kissing her brother for a cute photo, and pecked at John’s mouth, and then John opened his mouth and kissed him properly, rocking his head with the motion of the kiss, thrilled by the feel of Sherlock’s nose brushing against his own.  They came apart with a slurp and turned their heads to switch angles with amazing synchronicity, and then connected their mouths again.

‘Your mouth is softer than a woman’s,’ said John, when they pulled back.  Then Sherlock knelt on a Scrabble tile and cried out in agony.

 

3.

Cases came and went – one or two tens, some fours, mostly sixes and sevens.  Their eyes would meet over mutilated corpses, blood splatters and indistinct footprints and again, they’d feel very close to each other, but very far apart.  They both thought about the moments they’d spent kissing, and both wondered whether they were stumbling blindly in the right direction, or whether they’d taken a terrible misguided turn that would only lead to embarrassment and misery. 

They never spoke about their physical interactions.  Analysing it out loud seemed pointless and unpleasant.  But when they were alone, they slowly grew bolder, and eventually came to blowjobs, so to speak. 

One night after dinner at Angelo’s, they made their way up the stairs to their flat in fits of laughter over Lestrade’s new number 1 buzzed haircut, and tumbled through the door restless and happy.  Sherlock was uncharacteristically half-drunk on red wine, and John was full of pasta, and he found himself amused and aroused by Sherlock’s slight lack of control.  Sherlock half-slammed the door behind them and stumbled back against it, knees slightly bent, looking at John with woozy eyes, and John became keenly aware of the seam of his jeans against his half-hard cock.

‘Shhhh,’ said Sherlock, his right hand pointing at nothing over John’s left shoulder.  ‘I had three and two-half… and a half glasses, and I’m perfectly fine.’  John felt a charge of perverse erotic energy skitter from his shoulders to his fingertips.  He took Sherlock beneath the shoulders, hoisting him from out of a slow slide down the door, and slung Sherlock’s arm around his shoulders, tugging him towards the bedroom.  ‘I don’t need help,’ Sherlock looked down at the top of John’s head and then pressed his nose into his crown and deeply smelled his hair.  ‘I’ve been walking since I was born, you know.’

‘However remarkable you might be,’ said John, ‘I very much doubt that.’

‘I did,’ said Sherlock.  ‘I was.  I came out of the womb walking.’  He let out a high-pitched laugh that sounded like an attempt to sing.

Both of them lying fully clothed on Sherlock’s rumpled bed, John began to coax secrets out of Sherlock, at first small, and then larger and more scandalous.

What was Sherlock’s favourite film?  The Philadelphia Story, surprisingly enough.

Did he play any instruments other than the violin?  He’d tried the clarinet, but he’d become worried it would ruin his beautiful overbite.

Who was the most unlikely person he’d ever felt attracted to?   A year after he met Mrs. Hudson, he’d developed a confusing crush on her that lasted three months and then petered out into strong affection.

Did his Mum used to sing him lullabies?  Yes.  One about a horse and its feet going ‘clip, clip, clop’.

When did he first masturbate?  Once when he was twelve, several hundred times between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and then never again until he was twenty-seven, when he worked it into his routine once a fortnight.

Was he straight?  Gay?  Bisexual?  He’d never said or thought he was anything, out loud or in his head.  He liked people who were interesting, but he didn’t think about them while he masturbated.  When he masturbated, once a fortnight, he thought about the most complex notions of quantum physics.

Did he like blow jobs?  He’d only had three in his lifetime, but they were all spectacular.

At this point John thought it was appropriate to slide down on the mattress until he reached Sherlock’s crotch and undo his trousers, pull down those and his pants until he freed Sherlock’s prick.  It was ruddier than he’d expected for someone so apparently bloodless and ivory-white, the head flushed somewhere between Blush Noisette and Soft Montelimar on the Dulux colour chart.  It was on the small side – perhaps five inches, fully hard – and John thought he could fit the whole thing in his mouth very comfortably.

‘You always shave everything off down there?’ asked John.

‘Drives me mad,’ said Sherlock.  ‘Hate pubic hair.’

‘Doesn’t it itch?’

‘Yes.’

John held Sherlock’s shaft carefully between finger and thumb, squeezed slightly, experimentally.  Felt the spongy erectile tissue beneath the soft, sliding layer of skin.  Sherlock was circumcised.  The glans was small, proportional to the shaft.  Without a foreskin, without pubic hair, his penis looked naked.  Like a miniature naked person, flushed with embarrassment.  John found this turned him on, along with the transgressive thought of his hand on his flatmate’s privates.  Sherlock reached down and pulled up the hem of his shirt to give John a better look, and crawled his fingers down to scratch over the tiny buds of stubble barely-visible on the triangle of flesh above his penis.  He scratched lightly, and then more firmly, moaning with satisfaction.  John worked his hand between the mattress and his front, undid his own jeans, reached inside his pants and jerked himself.  His hand was squashed by his own weight, but it felt wonderful.  With his other hand, he held Sherlock’s penis close to his mouth, venturing forward in fits and starts to taste the head, work his lower lip against the shaft, and finally draw the whole thing into his mouth and suck on it like an ice pop.

 

4.

During long days at the surgery, John would think of Sherlock’s hand flying fast over his cock, frigging it slightly cruelly until it jerked and spat in angry relief.  He would spread his legs a bit under his desk, roll his chair back until he could see his own lap, and imagine it bare, his cock hard and exposed, there in the surgery, and Sherlock kneeling beside him, pumping him with a sweat-slicked palm.

He began to worry that he was growing sex-obsessed.

On a quiet, insanely boring Thursday he had an hour between appointments, and wrote and discarded three text messages to Sherlock.

_‘Thinking of u, god I’m bored. Want to know what I’m thinking?’_

_‘Does it count as a sext if I tell u I’m horny as hell?’_

_Do you think this whole ‘thing’ is a bit weird?_

He thought for three long minutes before composing the final draft.

_Do we need Tunnock’s teacakes or did Mrs Hudson get some in Friday’s big shop?_

And sent it.

 

5.

Sherlock never offered to give John a blowjob, and John told himself he wasn’t waiting for him to offer.  Sherlock’s hand jobs were frantic and purposeful and explosively satisfying.  He never looked too long or too hard at John’s cock, despite John’s frequent unashamed scrutiny of his.  It wasn’t that he found John’s cock unattractive – it was aesthetically lovely, Sherlock thought, particularly in its flaccid state, soft and clean and wrinkled and wonderfully pale in contrast to John’s pubic hair, which was darker than the hair on his head.  But he didn’t want to be seen to find it too fascinating.  He wasn’t sure what he feared would happen if he stopped and took a good look at John’s private parts, but it embarrassed him to think about it, so he only glanced and glimpsed.

They’d both, of course, wondered about anal sex.  Sherlock pictured himself on top, John’s back to him, on all fours, on the bed, or on the sofa.  They were clothed apart from where his prick slid into John’s arsehole.  He watched his own penis disappear and emerge.  He wasn’t afraid of looking long and hard at his own penis.  John pictured them naked, face-to-face.  He was inside Sherlock, and Sherlock’s head was tipped back in ecstasy.  John licked and nipped at Sherlock’s neck and it tasted of aftershave.

They never actually got round to it.  It didn’t really matter too much to either of them.

 

6.

They never told anyone, either.  After a long time, they began to talk a little more between themselves about their fantasies and desires.  Many of John’s were heterosexual, and this worried Sherlock, though he never said.  Some of Sherlock’s were faintly disturbing, though John pretended to be unfazed for fear of discouraging him.  But they never even thought of telling anyone else about these aspects of their relationship.  What was there to tell, in any case, and how would they go about telling it?

They stopped dating other people, and in their minds, they belonged to each other.  They fought like cat and dog (Sherlock was the cat) and made up without cuddling.  They worked sex into their schedule once a fortnight.

They never split up, though they didn’t think of this in terms of a happy ending.  It was just almost-right.  An incomplete solution to the baffling mystery of their strange association.

But the most beautiful, complex mysteries in life are never meant to be solved.         


End file.
